The First Horror Film, Georges Méliès’ The Haunted Castle (1896)

in Film | October 27th, 2015

In literature, graphic descriptions of menace and dismemberment by monsters are as old as Beowulf and much, much older still, though it wasn’t until Horace Walpole’s 18th century novel The Castle of Otranto inspired the gothic romance novel that horror-qua-horror came into fashion. Without Walpole, and better-known gothic innovators like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, we’d likely never have had Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King. But nowadays when we think of horror, we usually think of film—and all of its various contemporary subgenres, including creepy psychological twists on good-old-fashion monster movies, like The Babadook.

But from whence came the horror film? Was it 1931, a banner horror year in which audiences saw both Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula? Certainly classic films by masters of the genre, but they did not originate the horror movie. There is, of course, F.W. Murnau’s terrifying silent Nosferatu from 1922 (and the real life horror of its deceased director’s missing head).

And what about German expressionism? “A case can be made,” argued Roger Ebert, that Robert Weine’s 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari “was the first true horror film”—a “subjective psychological fantasy” in which “unspeakable horror becomes possible.” Perhaps. But even before Weine’s still-effectively-disorienting cinematic work disturbed audiences worldwide, there was Paul Wegener’s first, 1915 version of The Golem, a character, writes Penn State’s Kevin Jack Hagopian, that served as “one of the most significant ancestors to the cinematic Frankenstein of James Whale and Boris Karloff.“ Even earlier, in 1910, Thomas Edison produced an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s monster story.

So how far back do we have to go to find the first horror movie? Almost as far back as the very origins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French special-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle, or the Manor of the Devil). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fantasy A Trip to the Moon—and for the tribute paid to him in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his innovative methods to tell a story, writes Maurice Babbis at Emerson University journal Latent Image, of “a large bat that flies into a room and transforms into Mephistopheles. He then stands over a cauldron and conjures up a girl along with some phantoms and skeletons and witches, but then one of them pulls out a crucifix and the demon disappears.” Not much of a story, granted, and it’s not particularly scary, but it is an excellent example of a technique Méliès supposedly discovered that very year. According to Earlycinema.com,

In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene — objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects.

Thus was born The Haunted Castle, technically the first horror film, and one of the first movies—likely the very first—to deliberately use special effects to frighten its viewers.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Freddie Mercury’s Final Video Performance

in Music | October 26th, 2015

However you feel about Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen reforming recently under the band’s name with American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert on vocals, the band has stated on several occasions that they never intended to replace Freddie Mercury. “[Lambert] interprets the songs the way he interprets them which is wonderful,” May has remarked, “We wanted him to be himself.” Fair enough. But even if Queen had wanted to replace Mercury after his death from AIDS complications in 1991, the task would have proved impossible. No one sounds like Freddie Mercury, no one commands a stage like he did, and no one writes like him either, with his unique mix of raunchy, funny, quirky, candid, and deeply heartfelt lyricism.

“Mother Love,” the last song Mercury recorded—at the band’s Montreux studio—contains some of the most painful of Mercury’s lyrics, an expression of his desire “for peace before I die.” In what we can’t help but hear in hindsight as a direct reference to his illness, Mercury sings, “My body’s aching, but I can’t sleep… I’m coming home to my sweet / Mother love.” The inherent pathos of “Mother Love,” pervades the posthumously-released 1995 album Made in Heaven, but the song that most seemed to define Freddie Mercury immediately after his death is also a rumination on mortality. Shot through with nostalgia, remorse, and expressions of the brevity of life, “These Are the Days of Our Lives”—from Innuendo, the last album the band released during Mercury’s lifetime—laments, “you can’t turn back the clock, you can turn back the tide.” Longing for childhood lost, Mercury sings, “the rest of my life’s been just a show.” Maybe so, but what a show it was, even in the band’s final video, above, shot in black-and-white to hide Mercury’s frail condition.

At the top of the post, you can see behind-the-scenes footage of Mercury from the “These Are the Days of Our Lives” video shoot, discovered, writes The Independent, “during a five-year trawl through the Queen archives by Rhys Thomas, the comedy actor,” who co-produced the BBC Two documentary, Queen: Days of Our Lives. “The footage of Freddie in his final video,” says Thomas, “is shocking. He is so frail, he needs two hands to hold a champagne glass. But he knows he is being filmed and wants to show people what he was going through.” Brian May remembers Mercury spending “hours and hours in make-up sorting himself out so it’d be OK. He actually says a kind of goodbye in the video.”

A consummate performer to the end, Mercury was determined to work until he couldn’t, recording new material until days before his death. In the full-color film from the “These Are the Days of Our Lives” shoot, we see him studying and critiquing footage of himself, fully engaged in the creation of what he likely knew would be his final performance. He had certainly come a long way from the shy schoolboy he was before Queen brought him international celebrity and acclaim. In the poignant video above, we see what is likely the first footage of the young man then known as Freddie Bulsara. The film shows Mercury in 1964—the year his family migrated to England from Zanzibar—with school mates at Isleworth Polytechnic (new West Thames College). It would be another six years before Mercury would meet May and Taylor and form the band that defined the rest of the days of his life.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Mr. Rogers Goes to Congress and Saves PBS: Heartwarming Video from 1969

in Education, History, K-12, Politics, Television | October 26th, 2015

What kind of delusional self-aggrandizer, called to testify before a United States Senate Subcommittee, uses it as an opportunity to quote the lyrics of a song he’s written… in their entirety!?

Sounds like the work of a certain rapper/prospective political candidate or perhaps some daffy buffoon as brought to life by Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell.

Only children’s television host Fred Rogers could pull such a stunt and emerge unscathed, nay, even more beloved, as he does above in documentary footage from 1969.

Mister Rogers’ impulse to recite What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel to then-chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Senator John Pastore, was ultimately an act of service to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its child viewers.

Newly elected President Richard Nixon opposed public television, believing that its liberal bent could only undermine his administration. Determined to strike first, he proposed cuts equal to half its $20 million annual operating budget, a measure that would have seriously hobbled the fledgling institution.

Mr. Rogers appeared before the Committee armed with a “philosophical statement” that he refrained from reading aloud, not wishing to monopolize ten minutes of the Committee’s time. Instead, he sought Pastore’s promise that he would give it a close read later, speaking so slowly and with such little outward guile, that the tough nut Senator was moved to crack, “Would it make you happy if you did read it?”

Rather than taking the bait, Rogers touched on the ways his show’s budget had grown thanks to the public broadcasting model. He also hipped Pastore to the qualitative difference between frenetic kiddie cartoons and the vastly more thoughtful and emotionally healthy content of programming such as his. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was a place where such topics as haircuts, sibling relationships, and angry feelings could be discussed in depth.

Rogers’ emotional intelligence seems to hypnotize Pastore, whose challenging front was soon dropped in favor of a more respectful line of questioning. By the end of Rogers’ heartfelt, non-musical rendition of What Do You Do… (it’s much peppier in the original), Pastore has goosebumps, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has its 2 mil’ back in the bag.

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite?

When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…

And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?

Do you pound some clay or some dough?

Do you round up friends for a game of tag?

Or see how fast you go?

It’s great to be able to stop

When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,

And be able to do something else instead

And think this song:

I can stop when I want to

Can stop when I wish.

I can stop, stop, stop any time.

And what a good feeling to feel like this

And know that the feeling is really mine.

Know that there’s something deep inside

That helps us become what we can.

For a girl can be someday a woman

And a boy can be someday a man.

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Ayun Halliday’s new play, Fawnbook, debuts as part of the Bad Theater Festival in NYC tomorrow night. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Hear Marcel Duchamp Read “The Creative Act,” A Short Lecture on What Makes Great Art, Great

in Art | October 26th, 2015

Hearing someone discuss the nature of art can easily grow tiresome — indeed, it has, as a subject, become something of a shorthand for the tiresome. But Marcel Duchamp, the French painter, sculptor, conceptual artist, and chess enthusiast, could do it right. He did it by getting straight to the point, a succinctness most famously demonstrated in Fountain, the simple, everyday porcelain urinal he signed and submitted as a work of art for display. The fact that the art world soon put Fountain (and its similar, mass-produced descendants) quite literally on a pedestal makes an observation about art more cleanly than thousands of words on the role of the artist in modern society ever could.

But where–whether you paint on a canvas, chisel into a block of stone, or make a purchase at the plumbing store down the street–does this impulse to make art come from? Do artists consciously create their work, acting out creative decisions made within, or do they merely give form to artistic impulses received from… elsewhere? And what do we talk about when we talk about the work of art the artist ultimately produces?

Duchamp, concise as ever, addressed the issue in 1957 when he gave the eight-minute lecture “The Creative Act” which you can hear above (or on the full Surrealism Reviewed album available on Spotify below). He identifies one important part of the process as what he calls the “art coefficient.”

“In the creative act,” Duchamp says, “the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of.” This gap between what the artist “intended to realize and did realize,” Duchamp calls the art coefficient, “an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”

But none of it matters, in Duchamp’s thinking, unless someone else actually thinks about the work of art. “No work of art — no balloon dog, no poem mentioning cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thirty-three-second performance by silent musicians — is a great work until posterity says so,” writes the Paris Review’s Rebecca Bates in a post on the lecture (and a “sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs” recently made out of it). She quotes Duchamp in a 1964 interview with Calvin Tomkins: “The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvelous.’ The onlooker has the last word in it.” According to Duchamp’s perceptions, we, as posterity, as the onlookers, have the last word on all work, even Duchamp’s own. So go ahead and yammer a bit about the nature of art; doing so not only keeps the art alive, but made it art in the first place.

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

in Books, Maps | October 26th, 2015

Image via Blackwell’s Rare Books

Back in April, we highlighted for you a trove of 110 illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien, offering a rare glimpse of the author’s artistic talents. Tolkien didn’t just like to write books, as we saw. He also liked to draw illustrations for these books, which helped him to conceptualize the fantasy worlds he was creating.

Just this month, Houghton Mifflin released a new book called The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, which brings together more than 180 drawings, inscriptions, maps, and plans–all drawn by Tolkien as part of his worldbuilding creative process. Most were never published until now.

And then we get this: a newly-discovered map annotated by Tolkien. Found in a copy of The Lord of the Rings that originally belonged to Pauline Baynes (the artist who illustrated Tolkien’s novels in print), the map intriguingly connects Tolkien’s fantasy world to real places on our globe. According to The Guardian, annotations on the map (click here to view the materials in a larger format) suggests that “Hobbiton is on the same latitude as Oxford [where Tolkien taught], and implies that the Italian city of Ravenna could be the inspiration behind the fictional city of Minas Tirith.” Belgrade, Cyprus, and Jerusalem also get listed as reference points. Discovered by Blackwell’s Rare Books, the rare map will be put on the market for an asking price of £60,000.

You can learn more about this map, considered “perhaps the finest piece of Tolkien ephemera to emerge in the last 20 years,” over at The Guardian.

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The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music

in Music, Neuroscience, Science | October 23rd, 2015

Photo by Sebastiaan term Burg via Wikimedia Commons

At the lower range of hearing, it’s said humans can hear sound down to about 20 Hz, beneath which we encounter a murky sonic realm called “infrasound,” the world of elephant and mole hearing. But while we may not hear those lowest frequencies, we feel them in our bodies, as we do many sounds in the lower frequency ranges—those that tend to disappear when pumped through tinny earbuds or shopping mall speakers. Since bass sounds don’t reach our ears with the same excited energy as the high frequency sounds of, say, trumpets or wailing guitars, we’ve tended to dismiss the instruments—and players—who hold down the low end (know any famous tuba players?).

In most popular music, bass players don’t get nearly enough credit—even when the bass provides a song’s essential hook. As Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joked at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1995, “thank you to my friends for remembering my phone number.” And yet, writes Tom Barnes at Mic, “there’s scientific proof that bassists are actually one of the most vital members of any band…. It’s time we started treating bassists with the respect they deserve.” Research into the critical importance of low frequency sound explains why bass instruments mostly play rhythm parts and leave the fancy melodic noodling to instruments in the upper range. The phenomenon is not specific to rock, funk, jazz, dance, or hip hop. “Music in diverse cultures is composed this way,” says psychologist Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University Institute for Music and the Mind, “from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin.”

Trainor and her colleagues have recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggesting that perceptions of time are much more acute at lower registers, while our ability to distinguish changes in pitch gets much better in the upper ranges, which is why, writes Nature, “saxophonists and lead guitarists often have solos at a squealing register,” and why bassists tend to play fewer notes. (These findings seem consistent with the physics of sound waves.) To reach their conclusions, Trainer and her team “played people high and low pitched notes at the same time.” Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalogram that measured brain activity in response to the sounds. The psychologists “found that the brain was better at detecting when the lower tone occurred 50 MS too soon compared to when the higher tone occurred 50 MS too soon.”

The study’s title perfectly summarizes the team’s findings: “Superior time perception for lower musical pitch explains why bass-ranged instruments lay down musical rhythms.” In other words, “there is a psychological basis,” says Trainor, “for why we create music the way we do. Virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments.” University of Vienna cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch has pronounced Trainor and her co-authors’ study a “plausible hypothesis for why bass parts play such a crucial role in rhythm perception.” He also adds, writes Nature:

For louder, deeper bass notes than those used in these tests, people might also feel the resonance in their bodies, not just hear it in their ears, helping us to keep rhythm. For example, when deaf people dance they might turn up the bass and play it very loud, he says, so that “they can literally ‘feel the beat’ via torso-based resonance.”

Painfully awkward revelers at weddings, on cruise ships, at high school reunions—they just can’t help it. Maybe even this dancing owl can’t help it. Some of us keep time better than others, but most of us feel and respond physically to low-frequency rhythms.

Bass instruments don’t only keep time; they also play a key role in a song’s harmonic and melodic structure. In 1880, an academic music textbook informed its readers that “the bass part… is, in fact, the foundation upon which the melody rests and without which there could be no melody.” As true as this was at the time—-when acoustic precursors to electric bass, synthesizers, and sub-bass amplification provided the low end—it’s just as true now. And bass parts often define the root note of a chord, regardless of what other instruments are doing. As a bass player, notes Sting, “you control the harmony,” as well as anchoring the melody. It seems the importance of rhythm players, though overlooked in much popular appreciation of music, cannot be overstated.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

in Maps, Television | October 23rd, 2015

“How did this even get on the air?” Both the die-hard fans and bewildered haters asked that question about Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surreal television drama that famously aired on ABC primetime in 1990 and 1991. That such an unconventional vision — and one realized, at least throughout the first season, with such thorough commitment — ever made it to the mainstream airwaves now seems like a historical achievement in and of itself. So how, given the stultifying rigors of the entertainment industry, did Lynch and Frost actually sell this package of cryptic dreams, backward speech, small-town savagery, a murdered homecoming queen, and damn fine cherry pie?

First, Lynch drew a map. Knowing that no TV executive would understand Twin Peaks without understanding Twin Peaks, the fictional Washington town which gives the story its setting and title, he drew what you see above. Nigel Holmes included it in his out-of-print Pictorial Maps, commenting that “the peaks of the title, and the town they name, are clearly visible as white-topped mountains rising out of the modeled landscape.

By creating a sense of place, Lynch made the town all the more believable. A straightforward map would have been dull by comparison and might have suggested that there was something intrinsically interesting about the geography of the place. What was much more important to convey was the mood of the story, and it’s nicely captured in Lynch’s quirky drawing.”

The book also includes a quote from Lynch himself, on the utility of the map: “We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.” As any Twin Peaks fan will notice, the map identifies a host of locations referenced in the show, such as White Tail and Blue Pine mountains (the peaks themselves), Ghostwood National Forest, and Lucky Highway 21. But “can you locate Sparkwood and 21, One-Eyed Jack’s and The Great Northern?” asks fan site Welcome to Twin Peaks. And if the much-discussed 21st-century Twin Peaks revival comes to fruition, will it dust off this trusty reference document and revive the askew but deep sense of place we (or at least some us) savored the first time around?

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Stream 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Classic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness & More

in Film | October 23rd, 2015

There has rarely ever been an artist more fully in command of as many different art forms as Orson Welles during his height — the late 1930s and early 40s. He revolutionized the stage, radio and cinema before the age of 26 and became a household name in the process.

Welles’s first brush with national fame came at the age of 20 when he staged an all-black production of Macbeth in Harlem. The 1936 play was groundbreaking both for its striking sets and its darling interpretation that set Shakespeare’s bloody tragic in Haiti. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this production was that it was done entirely with non-actors. Through sheer charisma and force of will, Welles coaxed and cajoled terrific performances out of day laborers and factory workers.

Two years later, in 1938, Welles ended up on the cover of TIME Magazine for his staging of Julius Caesar. He set the play in contemporary fascist Italy. It was a bold choice that turned a 340 year-old play into a work of great political urgency.

That same year, Welles also managed to freak out the nation with his brilliant, wildly irresponsible adaptation of War of the Worlds. Welles staged the beloved sci-fi novel as if it were a news report. The broadcast captured the drama and terror of an emerging calamity all too well; it caused a public panic.

Now you can listen to that infamous radio play along with 61 hours of other radio plays, all created by Welles for his 1930s radio show, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The Spotify playlist, embedded below, includes A Christmas Carol, Heart of Darkness and even a rehearsal for Julius Caesar. Check it out. And if you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.

Or if Spotify isn’t your thing, you can listen to another big collection of Welles’s radio dramas below at archive.org. Start streaming that collection here:

The notoriety of Welles’ radio work landed him one of the most generous movie contracts in Hollywood studio history. This is doubly impressive because, at this stage in his life, Welles had no idea how to actually make a film. The resulting movie was a barbed, thinly veiled film à clef of one of the most powerful men in America – William Randolph Hearst. This proved to be a terrible career move; Hearst’s wrath derailed Welles’s career for years but it did produce a pretty good movie – Citizen Kane.

Via Criterion

Orson Welles’ Iconic War of the WorldsBroadcast (1938)

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The First Horror Film, Georges Méliès’ The Haunted Castle (1896)

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Freddie Mercury’s Final Video Performance

Mr. Rogers Goes to Congress and Saves PBS: Heartwarming Video from 1969

Hear Marcel Duchamp Read “The Creative Act,” A Short Lecture on What Makes Great Art, Great

Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Stream 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Classic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness & More

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